The free world is the new continent in cyberspace that we have built so we can live here in freedom. It's impossible to live in freedom in the old world of cyberspace, where every program has its feudal lord that bullies and mistreats the users. So, to live in freedom we have to build a new continent. Because this is a virtual continent, it has room for everyone, and there are no immigration restrictions. - Richard Stallman -

Suppose you are running an organization with mission-critical Linux servers in one location and with IT experts. Imagine a situation, if your server goes down. What would be the impact on your business. For worse if you lack a backup, you are thrown for loop without a notice. To handle such gloom and doom you need an effective and powerful recovery tool with great recovery potential and allowing application of influential scanning algorithms.

Its imperative to have a comprehensive backup and recovery solution that would enable the recovery of Linux servers, helping you to get back to business and minimize the downtime. The backup software solutions provides you a complete back up of the files, data, database, system or server. To be more specific, it enables the you to make a duplicate of everything contained on the original source. After an extensive research, we explored the top 10 Linux backup and recovery software.

1. afbackup

It is essentially a client-server backup system, in which the workstations backup the central server, either simultaneously or serially. The user can create archives, extract them or list up their contents. The free to download backup tool can be managed remotely from the central administrative host or through the cron-jobs on the clients. The data can be written on it using any streaming device - normally with a tape device. The backups are written sequentially allowing easier access to data. Most importantly, afbackup can be set for emergency recovery on different catastrophe levels.

2. Amanda

AMANDA stands for Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. This free backup system for Linux allows the administrator to set up a single master backup server that back's up multiple hosts in a network to tape drives/changers or optical media or disks. Amanda can backup a large number of workstation running multiple versions of Linux with its native dump and/or GNU tar. Further, it provides extensive configuring options for controlling nearly all the aspects of the backup operation, and a number of scheduling methods.

3. Aconis True Image Echo Server

This backup and disaster recovery solution for Linux is designed to provide you with an exact, live Linux server disk image of the operating system, databases, and applications. In case of a system crash, True Image Echo Server for Linux offers you to perform an entire server restore in just minutes, and not hours or days. The backup solution has a dual destination backup option that allows the customers to backup the server images to two locations. It features a reconnection option that automatically attempts to connect to a group server or backup server in case it goes offline. Some of the key features of True Image Echo Server includes backup image encryption, differential backups, custom scripts before or after backups and create CDs with bootable images and bootable recovery media ISOs.

4. Areca Backup

This is a file backup software developed in Java. It works on a transaction mechanism that ensures the integrity of a backup. The free backup solution for Linux enables the users to select the files or directories to backup. It filters, encrypts and compresses the content and stores it in the provided location.Some of key features include: archive compression(Zip & Zip64 format), archives encryption(AES128 & AES256 encryption algorithms) and storage on local hard drive, network drive, USB key, FTP/FTPs server.One of its unique features is transaction mechanism (with commit / rollback management) for all critical processes such as backups or merges ensuring the backup integrity. In addition, the backup software provides incremental, differential and full backup support. Areca also generates backup reports that can be stored on disk or sent via email.

5. BackupPC

This free backup solution for Linux features a web-based front-end. This is an high-end, enterprise-grade system that includes intelligent pooling of identical files, no client-side software, and a powerful Apache/CGI user interface. This is a completely disk-based backup and recovery system. The backup software can be easily configured to keep full backup after regular intervals. It supports exponential expiry allowing full backups with various vintages like a settable number of most recent weekly fulls. BackupPC supports a full set of restore options that includes direct restore via smbclient, tar, or rsync/rsyncd or downloading a zip or tar file.

6. fwbackups

It's a free backup program packed with rich features. The simple and intuitive interface makes it easy to handle. The software supports multiple backup engines and allows restoring any previous backup.

fwbackups allows the user to choose between a wide range of backup format and backup modes that includes archive format and clone mode for recovering data from the damaged disks. It also creates disk images for the safety of entire operating system, documents and applications.

7. SBAdmin

SBAdmin is an advanced disk and tape backup management solution. This unique backup solution can rebuild a Linux system completely from bare-metal. SBAdmin also features Adaptable System Recovery (ASR) that offers the unique ability to recover the entire Linux system and install it into the same or any other hardware. The ASR also fully supports the various storage configurations provided by Linux and allows you to make changes to the configurations during system recovery.

8. Simple backup solutions(Sbackup)

It's a free to download backup solution for common desktop users. It features a GNOME Graphical User Interface (GUI) frontend and backend backup daemon. With simple backup solution you can write the backups to local directories or remote servers using the Genome VFS technology. It allows full control to select the files and folders to backup. The files can be excluded even by using a set of regular expressions. The regular backups can be configured. It also features a command line restore tool which offers python API for restoring a file or directory

9. Bacula

It is a set of programs that enables backup, recovery and verification of computer data across the network of computers. This software solution is easy to use and comes with advanced storage management features that makes it easier to find and recover lost or damaged files. It supports multi-volume backups. Bacula offers a comprehensive SQL standard database of all files backed up. This allows online viewing of the files saved in any specific volume. For more, the free backup and recovery solution also features a built-in job scheduler.

10. BAR

This is a backup and restore software for Linux. It uses Distributed Tape Services (DTS) for Linux on the mainframe supports file-level, physical region and file system image backup. The DTS component is a client/server solution that offers multiple client to mount and access Linux mainframe tape volumes across a network connection.